The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said the government was “dissatisfied” with the Venice Film Festival for labeling Taiwanese film Seediq Bale (賽德克巴萊) as made in “China, Taiwan,” and had demanded that a correction be made before the festival opens next Wednesday.
“In order to safeguard the dignity of the nation and to ensure the rights of Taiwanese to participate in the film festival, we will continue to negotiate over the matter. The designation ‘China, Taiwan’ is unacceptable,” ministry spokesman James Chang (章計平) said.
The film, a depiction of an uprising led by Mona Rudao, leader of a Sediq Aboriginal tribe, against the Japanese colonial government, is based on the Wushe Incident (霧社事件) in 1930. It was directed by Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖).
Photo: Sean Chao, Taipei Times
“Normally, the country of origin of a film is based on the nationality of its director, but the Venice Film Festival has taken a tough line preventing films from being defined as Taiwanese,” said an official with the Government Information Office (GIO) who wished to remain anonymous.
Ang Lee’s (李安) Lust, Caution (色戒), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2007, was identified as “Taiwan, China” when the government’s efforts to have the designation changed ended in vain, the GIO official said.
Seediq Bale is one of 22 feature films holding their world premieres at the festival in competition for the Golden Lion award.
On the festival’s Web site, the film is labeled a “China, Taiwan” production in the list of feature films being shown, while the list of countries represented at the 68th Venice International Film Festival has Taiwan listed simply as “Taiwan.”
The ministry and the GIO yesterday offered different explanations about the discrepancy in the two references to Taiwan on the Web site.
Chang said the organizers referred to the country as “Taiwan” when it listed its participants after the government protested against the country-of-origin label of the film, adding that the ministry has made progress in its negotiations in this regard.
However, the GIO official said the country has been identified as “Taiwan” in the list of participants on the festival’s Web site from the very beginning.
The film will have its global premiere in Venice on Sept. 1.
Scheduled to be released in Taiwan next month under the title Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (彩虹戰士:賽德克巴萊), the film will have its Taiwanese premiere on Sept. 4 on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei in front of the Presidential Office in a tent able to seat 600 people.
Production director Jimmy Huang (黃志明) said the number of pre-sold tickets in Taiwan have already exceeded 90,000.
Additional reporting by Chang Ching-chen
Translated by Jake Chung, staff writer
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the